Piracy concerns in connection with the theatrical exhibition of motion picture films are well known. Once a film distributor distributes prints of a motion picture film to exhibitors for theatrical exhibition, often a certain degree of control over the product is lost. For example, in the regular course of exhibiting the film, a customer in the theater may surreptitiously record the film using, for example, a hand held camcorder. At a more sophisticated level, a person seeking to obtain an illegal copy of a film print may gain access to a theater projection booth in collusion with an employee of the exhibitor and make a copy of the film after hours in a relatively controlled environment. In such an environment, the audio from the projection equipment can be directly fed to the camcorder. A tripod can be used to ensure a clear and steady picture. As a result, an illicit copy of relatively high quality can be made. Alternatively, the print itself may be scanned to create a video master.
Such illicit “pirate” copies of a movie can now be distributed over the Internet or using hard copies (video CDs or DVDs), and this reduces the economic value of the legitimate film distribution. With the advent of the Internet and affordable higher quality recording devices, this problem has become increasingly severe in recent years. Thus, a method for tracing the chain of people who produce this damage is highly desirable.
In 1982, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), together with the Kodak™ Corporation, developed a technology for uniquely identifying film prints. This technology is commonly known as Coded Anti-piracy (CAP) coding. The code is a series of faint dots in the picture that are added as the print is manufactured. Approximately one out of every hundred frames contains four tiny dots that have been added to the image. Generally, 11 CAP-coded frames are required to reconstitute the serial number of the movie print. Each unique configuration of dots corresponds to a print identifier. The film prints are usually coded for each particular theater in which a film is distributed.
Typically, in the past, aiming an analog camcorder at a theater screen produced a poor quality, flickering image, but the coding dots usually survived the copying and reproduction process so that the serial number of the movie print could be obtained. However, the advent of digital video compression and distribution technologies has diminished the viability of CAP coding. Improved digital camcorders not only take higher quality pictures, but video compression algorithms (which are commonly employed when the pirated film is stored in a digital format or transported over the Internet) tend to obliterate the CAP codes. Specifically, because the dots representing the code are extremely small and diffuse, they are susceptible to disintegration during video compression. Furthermore, the loss of a single CAP code dot during image compression can defeat the CAP coding scheme because the CAP code is represented by spatial image placement within the film frame. Indeed, CAP coding is dependent upon 100% image survival.
Another limitation of the CAP coding system is that a total of only 2023 unique configurations were developed in 1982. At that time, this was a sufficient number of configurations because it was roughly equivalent to the number of theaters in operation at the time and substantially exceeded the number of prints that had been made in connection with even the largest motion picture releases. However, today there are over 20,000 theaters worldwide, and major motion picture releases of more than 5,000 prints are increasingly common. Accordingly, in the CAP coding system there are an insufficient number of codes available to uniquely identify each film print that is being distributed.
Further, the frequency of code image repetition in CAP coding systems increases the likelihood that the public will see the image. This is undesirable as it can distract viewers from the film content or cause them to form an opinion that a particular theater shows poor quality prints.
Both Technicolor™ and Deluxe™ film laboratories have introduced newer systems that improve upon CAP coding. These systems place different patterns of dots in different frames of the film to be marked, and using these patterns encode a serial number for the print. However, in such systems the locations of the marks within a frame have either been uncontrolled or fixed.
Accordingly, there is a pressing need for a system and method that allows the origin of the piracy to be identified which avoids the limitations and deficiencies of CAP coding. Namely, an efficient and effective method for detecting and tracing unauthorized copying of a film print would be highly desirable.